Craig Ferguson Is Back and Ready to Tackle the Sh*tshow that Is American Politics

Craig Ferguson has never been known as the most political funnyman on television. When he hosted the Late Late Show up until 2014, his contemporaries Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart carried that torch. Instead, in the time slot following Late Show with David Letterman, Ferguson had a robot-skeleton sidekick, a talking-horse regular, and an entire cast of puppets. It was fun, albeit intelligent TV, led by Ferguson's exasperated, improvised monologues.

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In the last few years, late night TV has undergone a dramatic reshuffling: Colbert took over as host of the Late Show (a job Ferguson said he never wanted), Jon Stewart handed his Daily Showreigns to Trevor Noah, Jon Oliver has been an instant hit onLast Week Tonight, and James Corden is the new host of The Late Late Show. All of this left Ferguson jobless, looking for a new show outside of the late night hosting game (something he says he never thought of himself as, anyway).

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On Thursday, Ferguson returns to TV with the new show Join or Die with Craig Ferguson (named after the Benjamin Franklin cut-up snake cartoon), which seats the host with a variety of guests to talk politics, history, and philosophy. "What we wanted to do was have a meaningful Socratic discussion on national television," Ferguson told Esquire Executive Editor Mark Warren during a Hearst MasterClass conversation in New York on Tuesday.

"When you look at the first 22 episodes of this show, particularly when we look at American history, it's always about race it's always about slavery," Ferguson said. "Always. It's always about that because it hasn't been fixed, it hasn't been addressed and we don't own it correctly. It's born from the problem of slavery. This terrible darkness at the birth of this nation." The show, in other words, will be talking about subjects he was never able to tackle on a major network variety program.

Originally from Scotland, his outsider status brings fresh eyes to the U.S.'s biggest issues. (He recently became an American citizen.) "I feel the encroachment of a religious agenda no matter what that religion or non-religion is un-American. It's not post enlightenment, it's pre-enlightenment," Ferguson told Warren. "America is a symbol of hope to a lot of people. Look, I'm not advocating that you just walk into the country. I wasn't allowed to just walk into the country. But that doesn't mean you just don't let people in or build some sort of physical structure to keep them out. And by the way: We have fucking airplanes now."

So this means Trump ("Do you think he wakes up at 4 o'clock in the morning and says 'maybe I'm a dick?'") and religion ("Do you think all these politicians are going to church and actually fucking mean it?") are all fair game for his skewering.

Ferguson has always been one of the most honest hosts on late-night TV, made most obvious in 2007, when he opened up in his monologue about his long struggle with alcoholism. It's a topic, he wasn't shy about during his conversation with Warren.

"It was humiliating that I was beaten by something," Ferguson said. "I messed around with suicide in the throes of addiction. Christmas morning 1991, I woke up in a room above a bar … and I thought, I'm going to kill myself today. I realized that day that I had gotten to a point that was very dangerous indeed."

But the idea behind the show isn't for him and his guests to delve into their personal histories, or stand on their soapboxes and shout at one another; it's to have rational, intelligent discussions.

"I don't mind being wrong, and I think it would be interesting to see people who say, 'well I was wrong about that.'" Ferguson said. "They'll go, 'You're a flip-flopper.' You'll go 'yeah, that's what an intelligent person does when they get more information. They flip-flop. It's called changing your fucking mind.'"